In eras of stability when little changes, the capacity to adapt takes a back seat. As noted in Why Political "Solutions" Don't Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse, absent any pressure from tumultuous change, nature is hard-wired to keep the genetic instructions unchanged, as there is little selective benefit in modifying what's working well and potential risks in messing with it.

In other words, nature is conservative in eras of stability and low volatility. Since its genetic instructions are working pretty well, the shark genome is relatively stable over millions of years, with a few tweaks here and there to adapt to changes in its environment.

But adaptative churn takes the driver's seat when the ecosystem changes rapidly and the existing instructions are failing. This is the adapt or die moment, when species must experiment by churning out modifications (semi-random mutations in the instructions) and test them in trial-and-error: the ones that add selective advantages live, the ones that don't die.

If this period of intense adaptive experimentation is ultimately successful, the species' rate of change spikes and then drifts down to the baseline of low activity. This is known as punctuated equilibrium: the instructions drift along when nothing much is changing, suddenly spike when selective pressures shoot up, threatening extinction, and then diminish as the new adaptations relieve the selective pressure.

All this is automatic and beyond the individual's and the species' conscious control. We can't order our genome to speed up mutations and get cracking on the adaptive modifications.

Human civilization operates on the same principles of adapt or die: when circumstance change, selective pressures mount and the society must adapt or perish.

What's different is humans can stifle or encourage adaptive churn. As social beings hard-wired to organize ourselves in hierarchies, those at the top of the power pyramid will naturally deploy all their power to conserve the status quo, as any modifications might threaten their outsized share of all the good things such as wealth and status.